Bertillon

A recent New York Times article details the frighteningly pervasive application of facial recognition softwares, originally developed for overseas military use, to local police departments across the country. Because the application of the technology to domestic police forces is rather recent, there are no clear guidelines or restrictions on its use. Timothy Williams reports:

“The software can identify 16,000 points on a person’s face – to determine the distance between the eyes or the shape of the lips, for instance – and compare them with thousands of similar points in police booking or other photos at a rate of more than one million faces a second.”

Despite public reservations about police misconduct, “the F.B.I. is pushing ahead with its $1 billion Next Generation Identification program, in which the agency will gather data like fingerprints, iris scans and photographs, as well as information collected through facial recognition software. That software is capable of analyzing driver’s license photos and images from the tens of thousands of surveillance cameras around the country. The F.B.I. system will eventually be made accessible to more than 18,000 local, state, federal and international law enforcement agencies,” the article reports.

“But people who are not criminal suspects are included in the database, and the error rate for the software is as high as 20 – meaning the authorities could misidentify millions of people.”

Such cutting edge technologies that merge biometric measurements with the power of big data draw on a long history. As early as 1879, French police officer and researcher Alphonse Bertillon devised a series of standardized measurements through which criminal suspects could be identified. Introduced in the US in 1887, Bertillon System would gain widespread acceptance until it was supplanted by fingerprinting as a primary means of law enforcement identification.

Bertillon’s reliance on facial measurements was contemporaneous with the popularization of phrenology and later eugenics, which used similar measurement techniques to attempt to distinguish superior and inferior biological “races”. How might the racial application of such measurements have distorted its use by law enforcement? How might contemporary issues of racism in policing be impacted by the use of new biometric technologies?

Bertillon card 20472, November 21, 1908 New York City Municipal Archives